Most people think of googly-eyes or wiggly-eyes as a craft material. I've recently discovered that they can be a powerful resource in a teacher's bag of tricks.
I had planned a maker activity for my advanced students toward the end of their last semester of English language studies that I was eager to try. The unit involved some vocabulary for emotions, including terms like taken aback, a little down, on edge, upbeat. It also included some unreal conditionals--inverted ones like had I known...were it not for...as well as hypothetical situations with I wish..., if only..., supposing...it's (high) time...Students always seem to need a review with the verb forms for those, which can be confusing, using past verb forms for a present meaning and so on.
This group seemed to get it without needing lots of revision, and they were able to personalize the final freer practice activity, with some guidance. This group has been pretty much climbing the walls to get out of school, though, and, whenever I can, I try to add something unexpected to classes. As many discussions in the unit were about emotion and even artificial intelligence, I seized the opportunity to introduce students to a form of guerilla art known as eye-bombing.
The idea is to make a public space look more human by sticking googly-eyes onto it, leaving them there to catch someone's attention and make them smile. I had planned this activity last semester, sticking a pair of eyes in various places around the school, taking a picture before removing them, laughing hysterically to the confusion of anyone passing by. The goal in this mini-maker activity is not only to have fun and humanize a space, but also to take a photo and create a meme using the vocabulary and/or the unreal conditionals. There are various free phone apps that create memes, and it's an easy task for this generation of digital natives. These images can then be saved and emailed or shared in Google Classroom. They can also make for a fun review, looking at them later as a class. I'll share a few examples, some created me, others by my students.
I was lucky enough to get my hands on the googly-eyes that have adhesive on the back, to make them easy to work with. But double-sided tape is another option. I also limited our eyebombing to inside school property, and I gave the maintenance staff a heads-up about the activity, asking them to leave the eyes in place for a few weeks.
Afterward, the set of eyes stayed in my class materials, and I had almost forgotten about them. But they came in very handy a few days later during a private lesson with a young student who was struggling to understand reported speech.
I often like to use comics to teach reported speech, so that students can have a visual form of the exact words, "I love cats," before changing the form to reported speech: She said that she loved cats. This time, however, the comic that my student had created on a web app was unfortunately lost, and the subsequent one I had him do on paper (knowing that he likes to draw) didn't have great examples of speech to report. (I should have given some slightly narrower guidelines to that activity to get something more useful.) After practicing and reviewing the grammar several times, I noticed the student would successfully change the pronouns and verb forms in the controlled practice, but would forget to do the same in a freer practice, and also in his homework.
In one subsequent review, I had the student use these fun octopus fingers to unscramble some sentences, and, for the most part, he got the correct word order of reported questions: They asked him what he was doing. However, he had a hard time telling me what the original question was. That's when I realized I had to help him visualize it, and personify these speakers, and I reached for the googly-eyes. Together, we transformed the fingers and a ball of masking tape I had been collecting into characters. I made one of them jump wildly, and elicited the question, "What are you doing?" from the student, who was holding the two other characters. That's when a light came on, and he finally understood why he was changing the word order and the verb tense.
We used these characters to act out exercises in the homework that he struggled with, and he finally started to get it. Afterward, I had him contribute his own eye-bombing to the school, and let him use a speech bubble app on my phone. His homework was to write the examples he made in reported speech.
Guerilla art and eye-bombing are not at all common here in São José dos Campos, and my teen and pre-teen students probably think I'm a bit of an oddball. But if the act of making something helps them visualize an abstract concept or give meaning to an arrangement of verbs, then I'm satisfied. If it builds a bit of creative thinking simultaneously, then I'm thrilled. How would you use googly-eyes? How can putting a face on something change our perception of it? What visual and tactile experiences have made memorable moments in your own teaching or learning experiences? Remember, we are all makers. Sometimes the simplest thing makes a huge impact.
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